Falling in Love with Alexa

I am falling in love with Alexa. It’s true. She keeps me up at night, thinking of things I can build and functionality I can give her. It feels like the start of a relationship, where everything is still fun and exciting.

I have been reading all over the place about different applications people have built. Here are a few of my favorite resources I found about these new Alexa developments:

There is such a range of applications it is exhilarating. Everything from automating lights, locks, and coffee makers, to placing phone calls, giving cooking recipes, evaluating medical conditions, dating apps, fitness tracking, data storage and sharing, voice website development and more.

Currently, I have a lot of ideas I am conceptualizing, but the one I have chosen to start developing and fully create is a simple pregnancy app that will save a given due date and can be asked any day how big the baby is or how much longer until the baby arrives. Having gone through pregnancy twice, I remember constantly wondering how many days I had left and how big my little human was. The skill is pretty simple, but overall quite useful.

The first thing I need to focus on is how to persist the data of the given due date. I think I am going to store it in Amazon’s DynamoDB, a NoSQL database. There is definitely going to be a learning curve for me on this, but I’ll keep you posted!